IN the Taliban's Afghanistan, desperate medical students moonlighted as grave robbers and stole skeletons to help them study the human body.

Anatomy books with pictures of women, human faces or genitals were banned by the radical Islamic purists. Students were not allowed to dissect cadavers to study internal organs and learn which one was located where.

With the Taliban defeated and foreign donors promising extensive aid, Kabul University medical school is slowly recovering from five years under Muslim extremists whose views one doctor described as "pre-Stone Age".

But its chilly lecture halls and empty labs remain haunted by the all-out assault on science that culminated in the Taliban and set back Afghan medicine by years.

"Five of us from my class went to a cemetery one night and dug up a grave," intern Mohammad Rafiq recalled as he stood in the chilly, unlit hall at the medical school.

"The bravest one among us pulled the skeleton out. We boiled it, used antiseptics and then varnished it. We chose a big grave because a big man's skeleton is good for study."

The lack of skeletons or proper textbooks to study anatomy, the first subject medical students take and the basis for all that follows, hardly surprises the professors and students struggling to keep medical education going.

Over the past decade, Kabul's medical school has seen its library and laboratories vandalised, its classrooms turned into battle grounds and its curriculum twisted to turn medicine into a sub-discipline of Islamic thought.

The school's desolate state is all the more shocking since this is one of the world's poorest countries. Life expectancy is only about 44 years and a quarter of the 25 million population has no access to medical treatment whatsoever.

The school, built with US funds in the 1970s, offers bleak testimony to the shattered state of Afghan education. Lecture theatres have been stripped of light fixtures, the bare walls are peeling, there is no heating.

The door to classroom number 65 is riddled with bullet holes, a reminder the school was headquarters for ethnic Hazara guerrillas during the 1992-1996 civil war between the Muslim rebels who had earlier defeated Soviet occupiers.

Enrolment for the seven-year course has fallen from 4 000 to about 2 500.

The Taliban were no help, banning pictures of humans - meaning most publications on anatomy, especially gynaecology textbooks - and slashing library staff from 20 to two.

Islamic modesty led to dilemmas for professors who had no way to illustrate even simple facts for their students.

"The professor would point to his shoulder and tell us a muscle called the biceps started there and ended at the elbow," said fourth year student Karim Rahimi. "And he kept his jacket on, because there was no heating in the room."

Dr Bashir Noormal, a former embriology professor and now WHO national training coordinator for Afghanistan, said the Taliban did not consider science as real or necessary knowledge because only religion brought wisdom.

"Medical education in Afghanistan has been set back by more than 20 years," he said. "Now all the medical school has is four walls and a roof. - Nampa-Reuters